It’s early Saturday morning right now. Elizabeth woke up a little after 7:00… and for us, that’s sleeping in by an hour. It was really nice!

Before I was marrired, my preferred sleeping time was about 1:00 AM to 8:00 AM (or sometimes 2AM to 9AM). That’s actually been my best sleeping time all of my adult life.

When I got married, one of the things that both my wife and I wanted was to have the same sleeping schedule, so we ended up compromising on about 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM, and that wasn’t too bad.

Then we had a baby who wakes up at 6:00 AM almost every morning. She’s done that almost from the time she was born, and became very consistent when she settled into a sleep schedule (actually, it was 5:00 AM, but when Daylight Saving TIme ended, it became 6:00 AM). So for the past 19 months or so, our schedule has been either 10:00 PM to 5:00 AM (during the winter time) or 10:30 PM to 6:00 AM (during the summer time). The Daylight Saving Time switch was mostly ignored since Elizabeth just kept the same schedule.

Even though I’ve been doing it for for a year and a half, it still feels so unnatural. If I were on my own for a week (which I don’t want), I could slip back into my real schedule in about 2 days.

One huge advantage of it though is that for the first time in my life, I’m working a 7:00 to 4:00 schedule. This means a couple of things. I work in IT, and the majority of people are night people like me, so it’s not unusual for me to be there one or two hours alone before anyone else shows up. Also, I get to leave at 4:00 which actually gives me time to do a few things after work that need to be done in the normal 9-5 work day. And it gives me a very long afternoon to spend with my family.

I like the advantages so much, I plan on keeping up this schedule permenantly, even though the sleeping still feels so wrong to me.

Incidentally, my wife created a blog for our daughter. It’s called “My Joy” and it’s linked in the side bar if you’re interested.